Navigate in "Help and Support"

[durexlw]

On windows XP machine: go to "Help and Support" (start -> help and support)

I'm trying to navigate to certain pages (with AutoIt). The only challenge is: on different machines, buttons appear on different places.

So for example: on one machine, I need to press "tab" 4 times to arrive at a certain button and on another machine, I need to press "tab" only 3 times.

As far as my knowledge of AutoIt goes: In this kind of window (like 'help and support', which is a kind of a IE navigator but not quite) I seem to be unable to retreive the text from a control that has the focus... if this would be possible, I would probably be able to parse the text on the control that has he focus and check if it's the right one.

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Point being: I'd like to navigate inside "Help and Support", but keep in mind that the answer "send tab-keys and then send return-keys" will not cut it: since on different machines, things appear differently... so I need a more machine-intelligent-way: anyone has some suggestions?

Goal of this thing: I'd like to automate the process of "Remote assistence by file", so I'd like to generate a file, which if a sysadmin gets the file, he can just launch it, connect and remote control the PC that send this file.

Edited February 23, 2011 by durexlw

[CarlMontgomery]

have a look at ControlSend in the help file. You can send key strokes to specific controls in a window (i.e the gui buttons for help and support). Unfortuantly I've removed help and support from my xp install so i cant tell you what the specific controls you need to send keys to. You can use the Window info tool that comes with AutoIt to find the controls.

Alternativly if the client is Windows Vista or Windows 7 you can initiate remote Assistence from the command line using Run()/RunWait() which would be cleaner.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff356868.aspx

you could even write your script to check the value of @OSType at startup then use command line options if it = WIN7 or VISTA or fallback to ControlSend to the GUI if it's XP.

Edited February 23, 2011 by CarlMontgomery

[durexlw]

Thanks man, I appreciate the reply.

I don't think the ControlSend will work: The help and support is a kind of internet explorer thing: if I use the Window Info tool and hoover over a button, it just describes the canvas the button is on. It's kinda like firefox: if you do tools -> add-ons, you'll see a window pop-up and you'll have buttons on it, only when you look with the Window Info tool, you'll be unable to identify/control the individual button.

If you don't have help and support, you could get a sense of this by doing the Firefox example, if you would have any suggestions on controlling the latter, it might help me as well.